Asia Times Online


	February 13, 2002	atimes.com

Front

Mission Hegemony, outlook uncertain
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Five months after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, President George W Bush appears more determined than ever to forge a new world order based on unrivaled US military power.

But a growing number of voices, in the US and abroad, are expressing concern that his administration has not only failed to think through the implications but may also, by the very aggressiveness with which it pursues its "war on terrorism", be planting the seeds of its own undoing.

That Bush's aim is US hegemony, at least with respect to Eurasia, appears increasingly accepted abroad, if not quite yet at home. It was, after all, the explicit premise of a strategy paper drafted in 1992 by the current Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and Vice President Dick Cheney's national security adviser, I Lewis Libby. While the paper was substantially toned down after it was leaked to the press 10 years ago, there is no evidence that either Wolfowitz or Libby or their bosses, whose influence within the administration has risen sharply over the past three months, have changed their views.

"We all have to start using the 'H' word - hegemony - now to describe US policy," says Michael Klare, a national security expert at Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

Since September 11, the administration has given notice in a number of ways that foreign nations should adjust to a world in which Washington will simply not suffer constraints on its power or freedom of action. Its withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, widely seen as the cornerstone of nuclear arms control, was only a first step, albeit near-nirvana for the staunch unilateralists on the far right and neoconservative wings of the Republican Party.

Step two came with the announcement that Washington was ready to deploy, or was already deploying, Special Operations Forces (SOF) units far and wide - to the Philippines, Somalia, and Yemen - to help local forces fight or capture suspected al-Qaeda associates or even local bandits.

Steps three and four came two weeks ago with the release of Bush's proposed 2003 budget and his State of the Union address in which he redefined the war on terrorism to include the newly-coined "axis of evil" states - Iraq, Iran, and North Korea - alleged to have ties with terrorists and to be building weapons of mass destruction.

Bush's budget called for a virtual freeze on all federal spending in order to finance a whopping 14 percent increase in defense spending which, at US$331 billion this year, was already greater than the combined defense budgets of the next nine most militarily powerful nations. He also made clear that next year's increase would be just the first.

Indeed, that increase alone - at $48 billion - is more than the entire defense budget of any of Washington's NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) partners, a fact which led some in Washington to suggest that its real purpose was to discourage Washington's European allies from even trying to catch up to, let alone compete with, US military power, not coincidentally an explicit goal the 1992 Wolfowitz-Libby paper.

"[We] are increasingly headed for a military apartheid within NATO," noted New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: "America will be the chef who decides the menu and cooks all the great meals, and the NATO allies will be the busboys who stay around and clean up the mess and keep the peace - indefinitely."

Similarly, Bush's declarations about pre-emptive defense against the new "axis of evil" as the next stage in the war against terror confirmed what had already become clear: in the admiring words of Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, "... to seek support for more war - far wider, larger and more risky".

As one observer, Michael Kinsley, noted in another Post article this week: "[The administration] has nudged us down the slippery slope from destroying al-Qaeda headquarters to destroying the government that 'harbored' the headquarters, to invading or bombing other countries where al-Qaeda may have operations or that sponsor al-Qaeda operations elsewhere, to military action against countries that harbor or sponsor terrorists unconnected to 9/11, to action against countries that do other bad things, like developing nuclear weapons."

The anti-terrorism war has become an open-ended struggle, presumably justifying - with virtually no public debate to date - military intervention from the Philippines to Somalia, the threat of imminent war from Baghdad to Pyongyang, and record increases in the defense budget that has thrown the federal treasury into deficit. And this is just the beginning, according to the administration.

But the question which is beginning to percolate up into policy circles in Washington is whether this strategy is even remotely sustainable, driven, as it is now, primarily by the lingering trauma of September 11, the virtually effortless ouster of the Taliban government, and Bush's stratospheric standing in the public-opinion polls.

For most of the past two decades, those same polls have consistently shown that the public rejects by a substantial margin the notion that Washington should act as the "world's policeman" or even as the "first among equals" in international affairs. In that respect, Bush's policy and the current mood represent a serious aberration. Remarkably, such views are being expressed less by Democrats, who by and large remain unwilling to take on the president in foreign policy at the moment, than by moderate Republicans who last week began publicly questioning where the administration is taking the country.

While questioning Secretary of State Colin Powell, Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam War veteran, even referred to Bush's rhetoric and actions of late as "very dangerous" and the administration's attitude toward European reservations as "cavalier". "Once you get started down a track, you can't, in State Department parlance, walk it back," he told Powell in remarks that were immediately endorsed by Rhode Island Republican Lincoln Chafee.

Similarly, voices are being raised about the costs of Bush's grand strategy, particularly given evidence of continued weakness in the economy and the projected deficits which increased defense spending will create. "There really is a question of imperial overstretch here," says Klare. "I don't think they've thought through how much this is really going to cost to maintain."

According to Friedman, Washington's insistence on setting the agenda in NATO will mean the end of the alliance, while to Kinsley, Bush's constantly expanding war aims and military deployments are leading to a "a quagmire of global scale". And regional experts are already warning that the intervention of US advisers in remote regions of Yemen, southern Philippines, and Somalia could spur serious local backlashes that may prove profoundly destabilizing.

So far, Washington has avoided quagmire in Afghanistan, although how Bush will reconcile his pledge to restore stability to that country with his refusal to provide US peace-keepers to disarm or pacify the warlords who have filled the vacuum left by the Taliban outside Kabul remains a problem that Washington seems very far from resolving.

(Inter Press Service)

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